Colorado Premiere
In Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, thousands of gill nets drift down, walls of death intended to snare the endangered totoaba — a fish whose bladder is worth more than gold in China. The hunt for the totoaba has created a multi-million dollar black market, attracting Mexican cartels and Chinese wildlife traffickers and destroying all marine life in its path. This includes the world’s smallest whale, the vaquita, a shy creature whose population has been fished to less than 30 individuals. “It’s extinction in real time, under our eyes, entirely driven by profits and greed,” says a wildlife investigator at the center of this film. “If we don’t save the vaquita, we will lose the whole Sea of Cortez.” This hard-hitting environmental thriller follows the environmentalists, journalists, activist and officers who are on a desperate and dangerous quest to rescue the vaquita before it’s too late.